Quite a few people in the US seem shocked to discover just how many of their fellow citizens are fascists or even full-on nazis. Not Casablanca-style “shocked, shocked’ — I mean genuinely disoriented and gobsmacked to realize they’re surrounded by people who reject liberal values. They shouldn’t be surprised, though: they were warned about it for decades but didn’t want to listen. We even have a convenient name for their denialism: Godwin’s Law.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
We haven’t heard much about his “law” lately for the obvious reason that the US federal government has been taken over in key respects by a guy who devotes a part of each day to cooking up his next Nazi signal: Hitlergruß salutes, visual devices, sekrit kodes, puns, and more — and that’s just in the last month. So, yeah, in February 2025, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one because Nazis are everywhere.
So, if Godwin’s “Law” was ever a law, it isn’t one anymore.
Godwin coined his thing (sorry, it isn’t a law) in 1990. As he described it in WiReD four years later:
So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme…and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons.
For years now — probably many years now — I’ve been poking fun at Godwin’s “Law”:
whether it qualifies as a law is of zero interest what matters is how people use it and the way they used it for decades was to shut down anyone who pointed out signs of incipient fascism.
Now, surprise surprise, the US is crawling with fascists and nazis.